Let's develop an open-source media archive standard

[John Foust]

At 02:10 PM 8/11/2004, Dwight K. Elvey wrote:
> We need to be looking at capturing the
>raw data from the disk. And at methods of post processing this
>to a form similar to what comes from the floppy controller.

And if you want to get really crazy, there's Jerome Fine's
methods of reconstructing faded magtapes by digitizing and 
DSP-ing the raw data, or the obscure emulator tools that
can read the data from digitized cassette images of programs
and data.  

I wish there was a mechanism like this for recovering
video from 8mm video tape; I have some munged tapes I'd like to 
recover someday.  Certainly others in the future and present world
could benefit from videotape recovery schemes.  And then there's 
the NSA's methods of reading erased data from hard disks.

I vote for ASCII and not binary or compressed binary in
the files.  Compression is for afterwards and outside.

With the right code, an emulator could keep the
offsets to the "blocks" and rewrite the hex as needed
in-place.  :-)

- John